Monday, February 23, 2015

It caught my attention the other day
when some government RFP circulated for “game-changer”
technology proposals for something or other, on a technology mailing
list. Well, seems to me that most significant progress has been made
in small steps. Rocketry had to start with black powder, then with
rudimentary cryogenics. Scaled up to say, the V-2, it still took
years to perfect. Then, scaled up further still, to orbit an
astronaut. More years of hard work were required. From the early
days of rocketry up to the first orbiting “Sputnik” took around
100 years.

The Internet could be said to have
started with Morse code – the first effective transmission of
information over wires, predating voice transmission. Sometime
later the Baudot code was adopted for most teletype transmissions.
This was a five-bit scheme of sorts. This was surpassed by other,
denser communications technologies, culminating in the TCP-IP
protocols used in the Internet today. From the earliest adoption of
Morse Code up to early Internet experiments took over 100 years.
(1844 to 1969-70).

The natural laws of physics we all
are enfolded and entrapped by require us to go about things in a
certain way. There is no “free lunch.” We must incrementally
walk our development forward, in small steps. Eventually we get
there. But the huge, amazing breakthroughs? Very rare, far and few
in between. And often it seems we only make a major breakthrough
because researchers have painstakingly laid the groundwork for us to
do so.

Stunning game-changers would be
nice. But it is the incremental groundwork that wins the day – in
my humble opinion. Thanks for reading.

Monday, February 09, 2015

On the occasion of the good news I
saw the other day – the fact that Obama is going to actually
request an increase for the FY 2018 NASA budget – it seemed as good
a time as any to ruminate on the state of all things space nowadays.

When one thinks of the unmanned
probes and rovers, things are looking pretty good. Between the ESA
and NASA, we have recently visited or are orbiting nearly every
planet in the Solar System. (The Voyager probes did fly by every outer planet except Pluto) Messenger went to Mercury recently.
The ESA orbited Venus with a sophisticated imaging probe for quite a
while. Of course, NASA has rovers crawling around on the surface of
Mars, and a couple of orbiters as well. The ESA sent an
orbiter-lander combo a few years ago (Mars Express) , and their
orbiter is still working. There is a JPL probe around Jupiter.
Cassini was orbiting Saturn until very recently, and sent back huge
amounts of information. The Huygens probe successfully landed on
Saturn's moon Titan, and sent back photos.

In the Asteroid belt between Mars
and Jupiter, the Dawn spacecraft is approaching Ceres, after visiting
Vesta. These are the two largest planetary bodies in the “inner
belt.” Then you get all the way out to Pluto, where the New
Horizons spacecraft is rapidly approaching to snap some photos. A
lot of robotic spacecraft are gathering reams of science data and
images these days.

There are also some sun-orbiting
observatories, and many Earth-observing craft.

The manned, or human-crewed
expeditions are far fewer. Crews of three will travel to and from
the ISS from time to time, and they are working on many science
experiments. As of this writing, a Russian and an American are going
to spend a full year in space, to see how people can do for that long
in weightlessness.

Living in space weightless is hard
on the human body. Bones degrade, fluids move around, sleep and
well-being are affected. We need to better understand how to
counteract these problems before more folks can live and work in
space permanently. But the upshot is, there are currently no human
missions to anywhere other than low earth orbit. There is always
talk of visiting Mars with astronauts, or going back to the Moon.
Testing is going on with NASA's Orion spacecraft, with a Human-crewed
test slated for around 2017.

It is easy to envision a future
filled with Asteroid mining, space colonies orbiting the Earth or on
the Moon, or on Mars. Getting there will be a long, hard road.
But it should be a fascinating journey, and this old baby boomer will
be watching as long as he can draw a breath.